Hello, Davey Jones!

So you've lived here on the planet for a few decades. You've traveled around, indulged a healthy curiosity, developed a working relationship with a great variety of strange creatures: You think you know what life on Earth is like. Think again. The "abyssal zone," lying far beneath the ocean waves, covers more than half the surface of the planet, and is the world's largest ecosystem. This means that most of the livable area of the planet is foreign, hostile territory to humans. Beneath those obscure depths is a grand and sometimes turbulent landscape, home to creatures whose existence continues to puzzle, as it has for centuries.

In Deep Atlantic: Life, Death and Exploration in the Abyss, writer/explorer/artist/scientist Richard Ellis proves to be clearly struck by a passion for all things oceanic. Maybe infected is a better description, because it's easy to catch. His tone is never overly boisterous, though. Deep Atlantic makes perfectly clear how little we know, the unsteady path by which we have arrived at that knowledge, and how surprised scientists continue to be by new discoveries which often run counter to current beliefs. Ellis also shows how easy it is, when caught up with whatever brave new world is popular at the moment, to forget that there are others. There are far more footprints on the surface of the moon, he reports, than at the bottom of the sea.

Likable and well-informed, Ellis makes a genial tour guide, though his plentiful tangents read like inspiration unleashed (and can sometimes get annoying). Despite claims to have cut back heavily from his original scope, by the first quarter of the book Ellis has already covered the history of several theories of continental drift, given a synopsis of two Jules Verne novels, traced the development of the submarine from Alexander the Great, and given a two-centuries-long tour of the Atlantic by submarine. With this book, historical timelines are not so much stuck to as stuck around, and sometimes the chronological connection between two events only becomes evident after you've absorbed a host of others.

Humans in Deep Atlantic are clearly one of many species, and despite all their heroic deeds they all seem to merge into one character. The humans dream, they plan, they plead for funds, set some records, die accidentally, or live on through fame or progeny. But if people are depicted as living in a bustle of activity, when it comes to the creatures of the depths, time seems to slow as Ellis lingers and observes their distinct, alien features: "Some species have glittering rows of photophores along the sides; others are equipped with filaments that glow; there are some with light organs in their eyes, some have them on their tongues, one species has a glowing rectal gland. ... One of the most unusual demonstrations of bioluminescence has been observed in Searsia, a black, bathypelagic fish that can discharge a luminous secretion into the water from a subcutaneous gland just behind its head." In these moments the chatty ramblings give way to precise description and disturbing, oddly exciting images.

As further proof of Ellis' powers of observation, page after page of Deep Atlantic is filled with his marvelous drawings, executed in the negative. Ellis uses black ink for lines meant to read as white to simulate the appearance of life amid the blackness of the surrounding ocean.

In the end, Ellis admits it's unlikely that humans will fully explore the deep sea. After many chapters, though, when it starts sinking in that the creature you're reading about - a mass of slimy flesh carrying a light on its head and a parasitical male mate on its side - is living only a short distance from where you call home, it matters less if you'll ever make it there. Like seeing a surprising side of yourself in a dream that you'd never acknowledge, it's startling to think that something so close could be so unknowable. Welcome to Earth.